5-11-07, 12:57 pm
Previous art theory/history has taken certain routes to understand art that I think, always accidentally-on-purpose, bypasses the most crucial element that can make sense of it. This is the role of the Aesthetic State Apparatus (ASA). What is an Aesthetic State Apparatus? I tried to define its basis in an academic essay published in 1999. Readers familiar with Left theory and philosophy will probably recognize the similarity to the concept of Ideological State Apparatuses made famous/notorious by the French Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser.
Althusser’s concept of ISAs was founded on the fact that all societies require a process of reproduction of their existing means and relations of production to survive in time. His idea was that ideology took part in this process by making people subjectively obedient to the ruling class. Ideology was for him a system of false ideas the effects of which, when 'acted out' in material practices, helped the ruling class keep its position of dominance. For Althusser the education system was the main site of this ideological reproduction. Teachers and professors were securing class subservience 'in ideas'. He saw the education system as taking over many of the roles hitherto carried out by the Church. (Note: he also thought teachers could and often did subvert this process).
Althusser took certain Marxist-Leninist concepts as given in this theory: that society was made up of warring social classes caused by a mode of production that exploited the working class, and that a State existed above the people, its main purpose being to keep the ruling class on top and benefiting from this. The State is a product of class conflict. It has changed its form along with historical changes in the Economic Base: from slavery, through feudal, to capitalist modes of production. It is a kind of 'shell', keeping things in place, by persuasion, and by force in the last instance. The State and its Apparatuses are a part of the extended relations of production, and so itself is a component part of the forces of production, in that it takes part in the reproduction of the conditions necessary for the continued existence of the current mode of production.
Base (or Infrastructure) and Superstructure is the classic Marxist concept used to categorize the State and Civil Society into that necessary for material survival, the Economic Base, and that which 'rises upon it' such as culture, ideology, politics, and the State. Althusser’s theory concentrated on the workings and effects of ideology used by the State and the ideological 'traffic' from the Superstructure to the Base. The Superstructure, including the State, is thought to 'react back' upon the Base, but the Base determines as a 'keynote' the general characteristics of a society and its Superstructure. The Base and Superstructure is made up of 'levels'. Traditionally, all of the levels in this metaphor, except the Economic, are Superstructural.
If, for Althusser, ideology was made up of illusions necessary to help secure the Base, the big question is where did these illusions come from in the first place? Marx understood ideology (false ideas) to be generated by the living-out of the exploitative, alienating, capitalist relations of production, which create 'metamorphosed conceptions'. Althusser veered away from Marx at this point into a more psychoanalytic view which we shall not pursue any further. Suffice to say that we can, I think, retain Althusser’s theory up to this point plus keep with Marx’s original concept of ideology (from ‘The German Ideology’).
Because ideology was for Althusser a system of illusive/imaginary ideas, this meant that, when it came to analysing art, it was its ideological aspect that came to the fore in its interpretation in later theories influenced by his work.
Instead, I proposed another level exists, the aesthetic level of human practice, on which art can be located, that is 'less Superstructural' than ideology and politics, and which deals with all of those things that 'ideology' tends to exclude, such as the sensual and feelings, sensibilities, customs, traditions, rituals, affections, habits, and so on. It seems to me that Marx would endorse such an idea because it is prefigured in many of his writings. And, art can be considered an 'aesthetic level activity', because it works with peoples’ sensual feelings and sensibilities. For a long time people have in fact been using the term 'aesthetic level' to describe this artistic area of human life without needing any prompting.
In the classical approach the Base is relatively fixed over time with regard to the other levels, and therefore has a relatively fixed material determination on them. The aesthetic level of human practice also has factors that make it relatively fixed. It is linked to aspects of human bodily existence that are slower to alter than even the Economic, such as Darwinian evolutionary processes, and within that, the development of our species’ physiology, the senses, and natural instincts and the emotions.
If we accept the existence of this level, it is only a small step to surmise there must be Aesthetic State Apparatuses that operate on this level 'officially', just as Althusser thought ISAs (Universities, Schools) functioned on the ideological level. And like ISAs, ASAs make political interventions on this level to ensure that the reproduction of the human subject takes place, as it would prefer, not just in ideas but also in the realm of feelings and sensibilities.
The Art and Design College, the Art Museum and Gallery and many other institutions that deal with art are therefore art ASAs. Also, the family and the hospital are, by these criteria, important ASAs because they deal with the body and its feelings, but we must leave them aside here.
As a part of the State, the art ASAs operate for the ruling class. What does it work with? What are its raw materials? These must be the 'handed down' feelings and sensibilities of human subjects, which usually take the form of the existing rituals, traditions, customs, fashions, affections, taboos, and so on that people in everyday life in civil society demonstrate and which might be called their 'aesthetic' in contrast to their 'ideology'. The task of the art ASA, it is logical to infer, is to refine these and to manifest them 'officially' as the 'official' aesthetic.
But these human subjects are not 'free floating.' We must remember they are embedded in and part of the capitalist social relations of production. And in these conditions, as Marx showed us, we do not find people whose subjective feelings are transparently related to their productive activity, but subjects who have alienated feelings because they are exploited. These latter feelings complicate matters quite a bit. Generated by economic activity, they are a feature of the same contradiction between the forces and relations of production that impel class struggle.
Alienation for Marx means being estranged from productive activity and so divorced from the feelings that can be derived from creative labour. This alienation is firstly affective and sensed, we spontaneously feel alienated because we materially live out alienating conditions. It is not, for Marx, a spiritual-mental (Hegelian) alienation. Such phenomena come into the realm of group psychopathology. If we are talking about alienation that affects classes, resulting in common feelings based on shared experiences of production, we can assume this is not immediately translated into sets of co-related ideas until these feelings are 'worked up,' as Marx might say. Until then they probably remain 'unconscious' feelings.
But are there really such things as 'unconscious feelings'? – For Freud, the answer is, strictly speaking, no. Individual feelings are always felt, and so known to the human subject for what they are, according to Freud it is only the repressed idea associated with the feeling that can be unconscious. But still, it does not seem that we immediately recognise our exploitation mentally, but we do feel that 'something is wrong'.
Where are these feelings worked up? In culture, of course. But would 'official' bourgeois culture be likely to work up the proper, perhaps repressed, idea? What is the proper idea? If the proper idea amounts to wanting to cease alienating labor, it does not seem likely. The art ASA would be more likely, it seems, to work up these pre-existing spontaneous feelings of alienation into a form for consumption (consumption is also a form of self-production) politically suitable to the ruling class. Usually, these spontaneous feelings would be offered an associated 'safe' idea, a worked up glorified idea that stands in place of the repressed proper: everything that is alienation (the loss of human creativity) would be glorified while the proper idea – revolution – would be repressed.
Now we must ask, what would a suitable aesthetic form be for such alienated feelings? I cannot go into this in any detail, but we might just note that because the proper idea has been repressed, glorifying alienation becomes the 'good' aesthetic for official art.
For the art ASAs to perform this function, the typical art tutor today has to perform a sort of awkward conjuring trick when educating future artists for this role. Genuine knowledge of the object (of enquiry – i.e. the work of art) must disappear, to be replaced by the bourgeois ideological world view of it, for which there is 'no accounting for taste'. But at the same time, some genuine 'know-how' must be taught to students in order for them to be able to do their work well. To use Althusser’s phrase – he was talking about academic philosophers but it applies to art professors too – the tutor will have to denegate the scientific knowledge of their practice in order to universalize the ideology.
The universal axiom of contemporary art practice since about the end of the eighteenth century and the rise of capitalism and its major art ASAs is indeed to exclude any idea of art having a social function or in fact any explanation. This is why there’s always, ultimately, 'no accounting for taste' in precisely those institutions that one might have assumed charged with the task of seeking answers to that very question. The traditional humanist ideology of a fundamental split in knowledge between the arts and the sciences operates here, with art taken to be, before any questions are asked, beyond accountability.
What then, is the reality? The reality is that art is directed by the State through education, museums, and galleries, both public and 'private', but that the 'artworld' tries hard not to be seen to function in this way. Many art establishments certainly appear to exist beyond the State as such, as charitable trusts for example. But the idea that such trusts and private galleries are not State institutions (and so not ASAs) can be dispensed with if we remember that the State itself can be considered a private association of the ruling class. Apart from the fact that the laws of the State in any case govern such apparently autonomous structures, we may also note that it is a function of the State to denegate its own apparatuses, to 'disown' them and re-brand them as 'public' or civic 'organic' institutions (even the State itself). I would go so far as to say artists own professional 'movements' are also fundamentally State institutions. In fact the modern State in the form of the ASA encroaches on every part of life that hitherto might have been thought largely autonomous (art, family, hospital), although a certain amount of 'play' still exists in every arm of the State, and State functions can be reformed.
Given that the State seeks to turn its subjects (us) into subjected subjects, the function of the artwork as an aesthetic product is interpellative.
This peculiar term means 'mode of address', the equivalent to the legal summons or hailing of an officer of the law: 'Hey, You there!' Here we are using Althusser’s (1971) concept (interpellation) in a slightly different way to his usage. Not - or not only - in the ideological but also in the aesthetic sense. Any hailing requires a material formal technique. Art is composed of two aspects, form and content. The form is the physical stuff present; the content may be garnered from the conventional system in use, like the perspective system in a traditional painting, which 'tells a story'. The interpellative aspect of art is its conventional technique, it is the way it addresses, or hails, you. The policeman’s hail is also the result of a history of a practice of authority in an institution (Repressive State Apparatus) in which a technique has evolved. Art provides the highest form of expertise for this type of social knowledge.
The traditional aesthetic of bourgeois art ASA interpellation is peculiar though, because it has the effect of concealing the relationship of the ASA to its subjects. Since, as we all know, the modern democratic State is supposed to be 'for our own good'. Since it is for the State that this interpellation works, its aesthetic must encourage the subject to misrecognize its own subjecthood. So, this means the State must mask the process of interpellation, it must appear to be for the subject, and so its hailing must either appear to be for the subject’s own good, or to be hailing the subject as a uniquely bad subject, or, simply, not to be hailing the subject when in fact it is.
So the bourgeois State uses formal techniques that keep the type of communication between the artwork and the viewer hidden or disguised. A typical artwork of this type might elevate the viewer into an imaginary dream-state through the use of high illusion, where they could occupy a de-classed position, one rising above the masses 'in spirit', even while the narrative content might easily refer to an apparently critical theme. It appears as though there is no formal technique, and so no interpellation, at work because of the 'normalness' of the conventional illusion, by the same token a typical newspaper photograph 'shows reality' while in fact (in reality) it is an arrangement of coloured shapes on a two dimensional surface.
By not being regarded as subject to any scientific rigor, the everyday condition of art is usually anarchic. The criteria for determining the value of artworks beyond the academy usually sits with the commercial galleries, from which the State museums usually take their cue. And what determines value is, usually, a fairly quick profit. Worse, because there are no criteria for qualitative selection, all involved in the art establishment rely upon the trend amongst their friends to 'know' which artists to elevate. In other words, in everyday terms, bourgeois ideology and aesthetics invariably chooses what’s to be considered the 'best' art. For example, the support of the rich collector Saatchi for a grouping of new British artists made it a fait accompli that these artists would be deemed 'good' and so raised the value of his investment (at least in the short term).
In the 2001 UK Research Assessment Exercise for higher education the report on the art and design sector drew a few conclusions consistent with the above thesis. It found that an absence of appropriate peer reviewed journals or their equivalent hampered the growth of an adequate research culture in art and design. It also noted that there was some confusion over how representation of research should be made in art and design, complaining that documentation (obviously meaning written documentation) was lacking as an explanatory accompaniment to many submissions with a strong visual component. The lack of an accepted theory of art that could more easily enable judgments of research through visual works here took its toll, quite obviously, on the research activity of educational institutions that had the task of researching art and design.
But a more dramatic indication of the extent of this problem came to light recently in the UK when the ‘Stuckists’ (a circle of figurative painters who are against conceptual art, the Turner prize and the prevailing policies of the UK Tate) complained about some of the methods used by the Tate Modern for art acquisitions. An online article by Charlotte Higgins (Wednesday July 19, 2006), arts correspondent of The Guardian Unlimited, highlighted the conflict of interest and 'poor management' in the purchase of art produced by serving trustees over many years. Apparently a report by the British Charity Commission found that the Tate had broken the law by buying art produced by serving trustees, including a £600,000 work by artist Chris Ofili.
Many major art ASAs in the UK are set up as charitable trusts. By law, trustees cannot receive monetary benefit from their charity without express permission, usually from the commission. The Tate failed to seek such permission not only in the case of the Ofili work, ‘The Upper Room’, but in 17 previous purchases of work by artist-trustees going back 50 years! At no point was the Tate’s breach of law noticed by any present or former Tate director or trustee, or by the museum’s major funder and regulator, the government Department for Culture, Media and Sport. It also went unheeded by current trustees with an expertise in regulatory affairs, including Sir Howard Davies, former chair of the Financial Services Authority, and Paul Myners, chair of Marks & Spencer and the Guardian Media Group. The Charity Commission’s full criticisms also said the Tate failed to manage conflicts of interest, with former artist-trustees (not Ofili) being present during discussions of purchases of their works, failed to seek independent valuation of works by artist-trustees, had no defined policy relating to purchases from artist-trustees, had insufficiently clear acquisition policies and kept insufficient records of trustee meetings.
What’s painfully obvious is that here we witness a part of a ruling class elite that has operated with perhaps too much self confidence, but who will continue to do so barring a few minor adjustments to the image.
So heavy has been the investment in 'radical alternative art' by such figures as these it seems a great irony that, where the effort has been so thorough in the UK to subject the art ASA to an accounting that would enhance scientificity, what they inevitably end up endorsing is often rubbish. Just to enhance my point: in an online BBC article of 27 August 2004 entitled ‘Cleaner bins rubbish bag artwork’ it was reported that a cleaner at the Tate Britain mistook a 'rubbish bag' artwork, said to demonstrate the 'finite existence' of art, part of an installation by Gustav Metzger, as a bag of rubbish, and binned it. The bag was part of Metzger’s ‘Recreation of First Public Demonstration of Auto-Destructive Art’, a copy of a piece he produced in 1960. Tate Britain said the work 'is made up of several elements, one of which is a rubbish bag included by the artist as an integral part of the installation'. Metzger, a German artist who lives in east London, invented 'auto-destructive' art in 1959. His work is said to illustrate the transient nature of paintings, sculptures and other artworks. It is not the first time such a mistake has been made, it was reported that in 2001 a cleaner at a London’s ‘Eyestorm Gallery’ cleared away an installation by the British artist Damien Hirst. In the 1980s the work of Joseph Beuys, which featured a very dirty bath, was scrubbed clean by a gallery worker in Germany.
I am not saying that such work as 'auto destructive art' does not hold any value, and neither do I support the studied philistinism of the ‘Stuckists’, but I think this is a sad result of our culture of 'instant radicalism' and demonstrates how a curator may determine what a bag of rubbish is, and whether it is art or not, but a lowly cleaner cannot. Why? Surely this is not elitist snobbery being practiced over self-destructive 'anti-elitist' rubbish art! The art ASAs curator plays a special role here in keeping alive these so-called ephemeral artworks, deemed radical because they are ephemeral, but which are actually not ephemeral because of curatorial practice. It is this element of ideological 'sleight of hand' that I think we should object to, and which reveals the fundamentally compromised nature of the work.
Art engages in class struggle, yes, but if this takes place on the aesthetic level of practice, it does so with the conditions this level demands. These concepts reveal that art functions in a mainly conservative way. Art (as such) cannot be revolutionary in the directly political, 'activist', sense because that is not the way it works on the aesthetic level. Change on this level happens a lot slower and more gradually than change in ideas. Change in the emotions and feelings is harder to effect, although at the same time this change, when it does come, is precisely more manifest, in new rituals, manners, habits etc. Art therefore has a duty to be for the long term, we might say it needs to be the opposite of immediate, to be mediate. And to be mediate - to mediate Base and Superstructure - necessitates the development of technique, for it is this that is able to slowly permeate society, engendering new social dispositions through new social forms of interpellation.
This was essentially what today’s dominant realist narrative itself was at one point – a new aesthetic interpellation suitable for the new bourgeois class and the burgeoning capitalist economy -: an aesthetic suitable for selling commodities. That the latter is a form that seems immediate, or to have many immediate applications, such as in advertising on TV (and this might appear an awkward fact for this theory) only shows that all aesthetic techniques begin to appear normal and spontaneous when they have, over time, successfully permeated culture. And let’s not forget that a characteristic of the capitalist economy is to keep revolutionizing the means of production, so its artistic equivalent would be constant iconoclasm within this artform anyway. Today in art this iconoclasm of narrative forms seems in fact to be the regulation, to constantly 'radicalize' it with new technology (I am thinking of artists like Bill Viola here).
But to make art that seems to work in the immediate by denying the long-term function of art is therefore not to make art as such but to produce effective workaday propaganda or advertisements for the ruling class in order to defend the affective status quo, the current 'normal' affective practices. There is, as we know, today a tendency to promote 'art' of this kind: the ephemeral, the kitsch, the ersatz is celebrated in the art ASAs. It appears to be 'safer' for the ruling class because it is more of an obvious liberal, 'politically correct' 'anti-elitist' commodity. Again, this has become the State norm. The State norm is Anti-State, the State art is Anti-Art: thus the 'political' art of the four favourites for the British Turner Prize.
| | |
